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Comment by exit | Hacker News Reader

on the one hand, corporations can take advantage of an immigrants sponsorship needs to lower wages / increase demands on their labor. you definitely seem to sympathize with immigrants on this point.

on the other hand "us native minions" (as you termed it) have an interest in artificially reducing the availability of skill in the labor market. some of your tone makes me think there's also an element of this in your stance?

i can't agree with the idea of restricting labor on the basis of the coincidence of where someone was born. there might be a sociological argument to be made when considering unskilled labor from less developed countries - but how can anyone justify restricting skilled labor, and movement between countries with socioeconomic parity (us/canada/eu/japan/etc.)?

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I sympathize with the immigrants. I don't have an interest in artificially reducing the availability of skill labor. I have a really big problem with leaving our own people out of a job because corporations would prefer to hire immigrants for less.

Really, though, my overall complaint was that this fluff piece tried to say "Immigrants create more jobs" when statistically speaking, they often take more jobs than they save, and only on very rare occasions actually create brand new shiny jobs that help the unemployment situation.

My anger doesn't even remotely apply to the cream of the crop, the genuine masterminds who come here to work their magic. Whether they're founders or very senior level hackers. Most of them aren't being underpaid here, and they're not contributing to the problem. They're not par for the course, either.

I can testify first-hand that the way the current H1B green card application process is structured actively discourages long-term investment in the US by H1B visa holders.

Given the possibility that you have to leave the US if you lose an H1B job (unless you can find a new one immediately), that makes you less likely to buy a house or a decent car that you will have trouble unloading if you have to leave on short notice. And I have deliberately shifted savings into cash vs. a 401k plan because I can take the cash with me when I leave.

Your position is called a 'lump of labor fallacy' by economists. A job filled by an immigrant still creates demand in the local economy (for housing, food, etc.) which in turn leads to more job creation. It's not a one-dimensional tug of war between jobs and unemployment statistics.

> My anger doesn't even remotely apply to the cream of the crop, the genuine masterminds who come here to work their magic. Whether they're founders or very senior level hackers. Most of them aren't being underpaid here, and they're not contributing to the problem. They're not par for the course, either.

so what would your argument be against just an average programmer, say from japan, being hired to work at a company in the bay area?

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